Should you own nothing and be happy?

Some questions are designed to divide, and this was not one of them. "Should you own nothing and be happy?" produced the kind of answer that flattens every usual fracture: 83 of the 95 voters with profiles said no, with yes struggling past one in eight, and not a single age bracket or gender group came close to disagreeing about it.

The texture here is uniformity rather than contrast. The youngest voters, the ones theoretically most at home in a subscription economy, rejected the idea outright — not one yes among them — while the over-65s did exactly the same. Men were mildly more receptive than women, but "mildly" is doing the work there: both sides landed firmly in No territory, and the closest anyone got to enthusiasm was the 55-64s, still rejecting it nearly four to one.

The slogan itself has always done more work as a lightning rod than as policy, a decade-old WEF thought experiment repurposed by critics as shorthand for everything people distrust about renting, subscriptions and corporate landlords in an era of housing shortages and squeezed incomes. This vote reads as a verdict on that anxiety rather than on any actual proposal — a chamber saying, in effect, that access-not-ownership sounds worse the longer the cost of living stays where it is.

If there was ever a consensus issue on this platform, this was it — Britain-on-the-platform, whatever else divides it, is not ready to give up the deed.